DDoS attack is cheaper than an iPhone nowadays

You'd spend less on knocing a website offline for a week, than buying a new iPhone. Ugh. New research by Arbor Networks, spotted by ZDNet, suggests that Russian attackers can be hired to knock a website offline for $60 a day. That’s just above £40. For a full day.

Arbor Networks researcher Dennis Schwarz has observed ‘Booter’ – one of the services which employs God knows how many infected machines to send large amounts of traffic a network’s way. The attacker is paid $173 (£121) and knocks a site offline for two days, using a force of 270Gbps. The operator, according to the report, goes by the name ‘Forceful’.

There are a couple of interesting facts regarding this dirt-cheap DDoS attack. First of all – the service has been used 108 times since July. Almost half of those attacks have been against Russian targets, and a quarter against US ones. Since July, ‘Forceful’ seems to have earned $5,408 (£3,804.53).

It also seems hackers are using DDoSing as a weekend activity:

"These new attacks are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the spikes align with the weekends. It seems the attackers are busy with something else during the week," said Marek Majkowski from CloudFlare.

The third interesting fact is that anyone can be a victim. Some of the attacks were aimed towards ‘benign websites’.

The majority of attacks peaked at about 240Gbps, but there was this one which hit 400Gbps. Estimating the average cost of a DDoS attack to the victim, Arbor Networks says it goes at about $500 per minute.